The ATLAS detector studies proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy of 14 TeV, seven times higher than previous facilities. It has an excellent chance for discovering the source of electroweak symmetry breaking (the Higgs boson) and possibly new forms of matter such as supersymmetric states. The lighest supersymmetric state is a prime candidate for the dark matter and supersymmetry is an essential ingredient of many attractive theories.

This detector is now in operation at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Since 2010 it has been operating at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV and will double its energy in 2013. The Chicago group built much of the readout electronics for the hadron calorimeter (TileCal) and is currently involved in preparing an upgrade to the trigger system (FTK) used to identify interesting interactions to be recorded. The group is heavily involved in analysing the data taken by the experiment.

The Chicago group consists of six faculty members together with research personnel and students. Many of the members of the group are in full time residence at CERN, with the rest in Chicago. The physics analysis of the group is supported by a powerful computing facility which includes an ATLAS Tier 3 computing system dedicated to Chicago physicists, and one of the five US ATLASTier 2 facilities.

Recent News and Highlights from the UChicago ATLAS Group!

Oct 1st, 2016: Postdoctoral scholar Max Swiatlowski appointed as convener of the subgroup on SUSY searches in squark and gluino final states and signatures in ATLAS!

June 8, 2016: Results in search for the Standard Model Higgs boson produced by vector-boson fusion in 8 TeV pp collisions and decaying to bottom quarks with the ATLAS detector released and submitted to JHEP (arXiv:1606.02181 [hep-ex])